Writing Blog

20220413 On The Writing Of Plays

April 13, 2023, 10:30am

Only a few people on WdC will remember, but I have tried my hand at writing plays. I had the opening scene from one up for a little while (thanks, Lilli 🧿 ☕ , for being the only person to read it and give feedback!), but tend to not show them that often.

Now, having said that, in 1991 I wrote a play equating a teenaged party to life in general, based a lot on the parties of my own teenaged years. This play had 22 characters, all with at least a few speaking lines, and so I was told it was too busy for modern amateur groups to use.

Fast forward 3 years, and the younger brother of a friend was in year 11. His drama class was looking for a play that the whole class could appear in, and my friend asked me if I could write a play for them. This meant a play with 19 characters. I gave her the play I'd written in 1991. The school found one extra student (the two cops were played by the drama teacher and his wife), and they did 5 performances of the play.

It was in a school setting, it was amateur, and it does not count as a real "performance" as the tickets were not available to the general public, and seeing my work on stage told me how truly awful a lot of it was, but it was there, and I had the idea in my head that I could write this stage thing.

I performed a few 2-man stand-up comedy sketches that I wrote with a former friend, I had a film made from a stage script (which annoyed me because I'd written some actual film scripts as well that were all rejected), and that was that.

Well...

In 2015 I wrote a play because the novella the idea was originally slated as was not working. 9 characters, about 90 minutes long. I submitted it to a few places and was rejected every time. (For the record, I had to reformat the play; apparently producers and repertoire companies do not like the dialogue to be centred nowadays; they consider that a "film" thing!) Then a local amateur group said they'd like to perform it. That was 2020, and they failed because of the effects they had to put into place to cover some deficiencies in the acting people. However, unbeknownst to me, they submitted it for me into a competition.

That's good, by the way - I would not have entered. I do not like competitions/contests.

I got an email this morning telling me the play has been short-listed.

So... there's no money involved, just a professional/semi-professional performance. If I finish in the top 3. I am not holding my breath, but it does make me think I should dust off Romeo & Juliet 2, and submit that somewhere...

Maybe playwright is another string I could add to my writing bow...